Bjorn Lomborg Unmasks Sustainability Absurdity, We Can't Afford Everything!
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And so the UN essentially ended up promising everything to everyone everywhere. And again, let's remember,

We allowed this to happen. Every nation in the world, the UK, the US, Denmark, everyone else agreed to this. We accepted that they promised we were going to fix poverty, but also get social security systems to everyone, that we were going to end hunger, but also get organic apples to everyone and do everything else. So, you know, fantastic.

Fixed communicable diseases, fixed war, climate change, pollution, corruption, chronic diseases, education, save biodiversity, reduce inequality, get jobs for everyone. It was just an endless list of all these nice things that we should do for the world. And again, as I started out saying, in principle, we should do all these things.

But that is enormously costly. Actually, I think the $4 trillion number you mentioned was probably an underestimate. There's another estimate that suggests that we would need another $10 to $15 trillion. And of course, nobody has $10 to $15 trillion lying around. And so what we have done, and I think this is what we're going to be talking about, is saying in a realistic world, we can't come up with another $4 trillion.

How do you spend the money that we have and maybe a few more billions of dollars? How do you spend that to do the most good for the world? That's a much, much more realistic approach. And of course, that's what the UN should have done already back in 2015. We should have said we can't do everything. What should we do first?

On this episode of What The Finance podcast, I have the pleasure of welcoming on Dr Bjorn Lomborg. So Bjorn is a renowned researcher and writer, currently president of the ThinkCentre Copenhagen Consensus Centre, which researches the most effective solutions to the world's greatest challenges, such as disease and hunger, to climate and education. So the findings of the 12 most efficient solutions for the world's poorest populations.

I'll lay it out in his recently released book, Best Things First. So Bjorn, thanks so much for coming to the podcast today. Anthony, it's great to be here. No problem. Looking forward to the conversation.

I'm going to start maybe with the UN and the SDGs, and I've sort of looked at one of their recent articles, and I've got a quote for you, so then maybe we can take it wherever it goes. So in a recent article in April, they were saying that urgent steps are needed to mobilize financing at scale to close the development financing gap, which they estimate at $4.2 trillion annually. They then go on to say that the international financial system, which was set up in 1944 with Bretton Woods' conference, is no longer fit for purpose.

It

It proposes a new coherent system that is better equipped to respond to crises, scales up investments in the SDGs, especially through stronger multilateral development and banks, improves global safety, et cetera. I was reading that and I was quite shocked. It's sort of pretty revolutionary stuff. But maybe you can give our readers some context about the SDGs, maybe why the UN believes it needs these sort of revolutionary changes and whether maybe they fit the purpose for what they're suggesting.

Yeah. So the short version is if you promise everything to everyone, of course, you're going to end up saying we need all the money in the world and we literally need you to come up with everything you've got. And that's really what they've done. They've they've talked about we should do all good things in the world. Now, that's a nice sentiment.

But it's totally unrealistic. And of course, there's something fundamentally wrong about saying, so we failed to consider that we probably don't have all the money in the world to fix everything in the world. And so we want all the extra money. There's something wrong with the whole financial system instead of realizing, well, probably there's something wrong with the way we went about saying, what should we focus on? So

Back to the sustainable development goals. Back in 2014-15, the UN wanted to update its very successful Millennium Development Goals. So remember, the UN has been promising lots of stuff pretty much since its inception, and most of them have never come to pass.

But in around 2000, they actually made some very, very specific promises. They basically said, we want to get people out of poverty, out of hunger. We want to get kids into school. We want to have moms stop dying, childbirth, and a few other very simple things.

And although they never got to fix all of those problems, by 2015, they'd actually achieved a lot of what they promised because they promised very simple, specific things that I think everyone can agree on. We should get kids into school. We should stop them from dying. We should make sure that people are not in poverty and not in hunger. Those were great, simple targets.

But then come 2015, they decided, well, we should redo this for 2030. We should make promises for the world for all kinds of things. But of course, it should be about everything. And so the UN essentially ended up promising everything to everyone everywhere. And again, let's remember,

We allowed this to happen. Every nation in the world, the UK, the US, Denmark, everyone else agreed to this. We accepted that they promised we were going to fix poverty, but also get social security systems to everyone, that we were going to end hunger, but also get organic apples to everyone and do everything else. So, you know, fantastic.

Fixed communicable diseases, fixed war, climate change, pollution, corruption, chronic diseases, education, save biodiversity, reduce inequality, get jobs for everyone. It was just an endless list of all these nice things that we should do for the world. And again, as I started out saying, in principle, we should do all these things.

But that is enormously costly. Actually, I think the $4 trillion number you mentioned was probably an underestimate. There's another estimate that suggests that we would need another $10 to $15 trillion. And of course, nobody has $10 to $15 trillion lying around. And so what we have done, and I think this is what we're going to be talking about is saying, in a realistic world, we can't come up with another $4 trillion.

How do you spend the money that we have and maybe a few more billions of dollars? How do you spend that to do the most good for the world? That's a much, much more realistic approach. And of course, that's what the UN should have done already back in 2015. We should have said we can't do everything. What should we do first? Yeah, I'd be interested to hear. Have you seen maybe a shift in the UN? It's like the more realistic goals, the more pragmatic to this, I guess, approach.

You know, very, as you said, we're trying to do everything all at once. This very philosophical way of saying we need to help everyone. I'm not sure. Have you seen a shift like that? Just just in these.

goals behind the scenes before this came through? I would love to say yes, but no, I don't think actually we've seen that. So the UN and what you just read, the UN's approach to saying, yeah, we did something that was totally, totally unrealistic is not to say maybe we should rein it back a little bit and be more realistic. The answer is you need to give us more money. So that's why they're asking for $4 trillion. I get that approach, but

You know, we've already promised this. So hand over the money. But it's not going to happen. And so in a realistic world, and I think that's probably where all the rest of us will have to come in. We need to rein in the sense of saying we need to do everything and then say, what should we do first?

Yeah, definitely. I think that's a key thing. So was that your influence for writing the book? Just the fact that you said, OK, these things aren't set for purpose. We need to be more realistic. Was there any other, I guess, influences for yourself for sharing? Well, so I'm a political scientist. I've been working this field for a very, very long time talking about we need to prioritize politics.

And look, this is obvious in your everyday life. You can't do all the stuff you want. So you have to decide, am I going to go on that vacation or am I going to repair my roof or am I going to take the family on a vacation or what about paying for private school or something?

You can't do all of it. And so you have to make these hard choices. We do that all the time. Businesses do this. Nonprofit organizations have to do this. We all have to prioritize. But in the political sphere, there's a tendency for most politicians to just promise everything because somebody else will have to pay or you'll figure out later and then you'll come back and sort of renege on some of those things. So there's a tendency to just do a little bit of everything.

And at the same time, we also tend to focus a lot on the stuff that makes for great headlines. That means, you know, if there's a lot of crying babies or a lot of cute animals or a lot of groups with great PR. And again, those are probably not the right places to spend money first. It's often, you know, these sort of forgotten, simple, easy things that we can fix that we should be focusing on first. So we've been doing this with the Copenhagen Consensus, my think tank, for two decades now.

Basically trying not only to get the world to think more on smart solutions, but individual countries. We just did one in Malawi in one of the poorest African countries where they have lots of issues, lots of challenges, but again, not enough money. So we work through with their government and with their national partners.

National Prioritization Council on looking at where can you spend resources, very scarce resources, and do the most good first. Again, this is basically economists trying to help by saying we have lots of cost-benefit analyses. We know how much it will cost, how much good it will do. Why?

Why don't we do the stuff that will cost the least and do the most good first? Again, this is not rocket science, but it's something that we often don't talk about. And that's the conversation that I wanted to sort of inject into the global discussion. Yeah. And if we go into the book, sort of, I guess, one of your main points that you mentioned is that, you know, for 35 billion a year, you could save 4.2 million lives annually and make the poorer half the world more than a trillion dollars better off each and every year, which, you know,

It sounds too good to be true. So I'd be interested to hear you maybe explain the thinking behind that and how it's so far off. Yeah. So what we did was we really teamed up with a lot of different economic experts across all these areas that the world is saying we should be focusing on and saying within your area,

What is the best evidence for really, really effective policies to do good? And so we put in a somewhat arbitrary point, our Nobel laureates have put that in earlier and saying, we want to find the very best things. And that means the things that for every dollar spent will deliver at least $15 of social benefits or for every pound spent, 15 pounds or for every shilling, 15 shillings, whatever your currency is.

The point here is to say most of the costs are fairly easy. You have to pay out for vaccines or for more schooling or whatever it is. But the benefits are a lot of different things that we then value in money. That's people not dying. That's families not being broken. That's kids being better educated, hence becoming more productive in their adult lives. It's wetlands not destroyed and hence providing more environmental benefits in the long run. There are all these things. Now,

Economists have a long history of trying to sort of calculate all of this. And so what we tried to do was to find the very best things to do in the world. And that's what the book is really about. We found 12 amazing things. It'd be surprising those are the only things in the world. We probably missed one or two. But fundamentally, 12.

12 amazing things that we have very good evidence and academic evidence. This is all period published in the Cambridge University Press Journal of Benefit Cost Analysis. So basically trying to find where can you spend just a little money

Not nothing, but I don't have that money. But in the international scheme of things, very small amount of money and do an incredible amount of good. And what we found was some of the things is about making sure people don't die. Remember, right now, about 18 million people die each year.

for basically because they're poor. There are some very, very simple things that we can do, for instance, for tuberculosis and malaria to make sure that kids and adults don't die from this. Remember, we fixed tuberculosis like more than half a century ago. You never worry about it. I don't worry about it. In a rich world, we don't worry about tuberculosis, but it kills 1.3 million people each year

totally unnecessarily. So we just need to add more money to make sure that we discover more of the people who have TB and that we make sure that they stay on treatment. It's actually not so much of a problem to get people initially on it, but it's about you need to take these pills for four to six months, which is hard to do. And there's some stigma involved. But this is fundamentally something that for fairly little resources, we estimate about $6 billion, you could save about

a million people each and every year over the next 40 years. How about that? We estimate that for every dollar spent, you will do $46 of worth. We likewise look at maternal and newborn health. A lot of moms and kids die just around birth, and we could save about 1.2 million of those

Sorry, 1.4 million of those people. So about 1.2 million kids and about 166,000 moms for very little money, for about $3 billion a year. Why don't we do that? This is about making sure that moms get into institutions, give birth, very simply having basic emergency obstetric care because birth is usually not terrible, but births

When things go wrong, you need to have emergency backup. And that's what you could get for about a third of all women who are still not giving birth in institutions. Very cheap, incredibly effective. There's malaria, chronic disease, childhood immunization, nutrition. So all of these, if you add all of these up, we can save 4.2 million lives each and every year.

For fairly little money, for about $20 billion. That's an incredibly good investment. And we're suggesting that's one of the things we should do. Again, none of us, you can't, I don't think you have that much money. I certainly don't. But we can do this in an international setting and do it very, very easily.

Then the other part is we focus, there's some economic benefits. So for instance, education, education sucks in much of the poor half of the world. And there are some very, very simple things we know work. There's a lot of things in education we know don't work. And so we're saying, please don't do this. Like spending more money on building more schools or giving higher wages for teachers. These are all nice things, but we've tested them around the world and they deliver very little or no benefits.

educational outcome benefit. But there are some incredibly cheap and very, very effective policies. I'm just going to tell you one of them. So one of the problems if you're in a sixth grade class, for instance, in a poor country like Malawi, you'll have, say, 125 kids in one class.

And they're all over the space. So some of these guys are very far ahead. Some of these guys have no clue what's going on. And one teacher will just sort of have to teach somewhere in the middle and losing out on the smart kids and kids who are struggling and losing most of the kids.

But the way to fix this, the economists tell us, is by teaching at the right level. One way you can do that is by putting kids in front of a tablet with educational software, one hour a day. Not give them the tablet because then they're just going to play games and watch movies on it, but give them one hour a day in front of this tablet. And that one hour, the program will very quickly find out, oh, you're at that exact level and start teaching you programming.

basic reading, writing, and arithmetic at a very basic level, but very quickly teaching you a lot. If you do this for a year, it turns out that you go to school seven hours a day, it's still the same old boring school, one hour a day you actually learn stuff. But after doing that for one year,

you will have learned as much as you normally would have done with three years of schooling. We've just tripled the efficiency of school. So the amazing thing is for about $31 per kid per year,

You can make these kids much more productive, about 2% to 4% more productive in their adult lives. That turns into a total income of about $20,000 over their lifetime. But remember, much of this is far, far out in the future. So the value today is about $2,000. But making...

them $2,000 richer for $31 of investment. It's a fantastic investment. It delivers $65 back in the dollar. That's one of the ways we'll make the world much richer. If we did this for most of the world, it would cost about $10 billion.

A year, but it will make the poor half the world almost half a trillion dollars richer. Those are the kinds of things that we should be focused on. We don't because this is not, you know, this is not sexy. This is not the things that have the cute animals and praying babies. But these are the things that actually would work and make a huge difference for the world.

Yeah, it's amazing. As you said, I think that would work in basically every country where it's trying to help individuals keep up or maybe strive if they're sort of a high achiever. When you talk about all these assumptions, you know, from my finance mind, I sort of mainly looking at companies and investors.

it makes me scared to think about how much work would have had to go into it to assume all these things. I'd be interested to hear more about that process. How do you dig deep into these assumptions of the benefits as well as the costs and everything? One of the things you have to realize, and I think that's probably also your worry, is

Well, people are not always going to do the right thing. You know, if you hand out all these tablets, some of them are going to get stolen. Some of them are not going to be used right. And that's absolutely true.

but all of this is actually included as well as we can do in these models. So much of this is based on large scale randomized controlled trial studies where you basically tried it in a real world setting, for instance, in Malawi, but we've done this many other places around the world to make sure that when you actually start spending a lot of money on this, some of this is going to go to corruption. Some of it is going to go to incompetence. But even with that,

you will get these benefits. So when I talk about the $31 per kid, you could probably imagine in a perfect world that it would only be 20, but we're also assuming that some of this money is going to be wasted. Likewise, when you talk about are all of the kids going to read all of the time? Well, it turns out when you have, say, half an hour on the tablet, it takes about 10 minutes to

to distribute the tablets and get them back in there. That's included in the estimates. You also need, in many places, solar panels on the rooftops because they don't have electricity. You need a place to store them at night, so you need to lock them up so they don't get stolen. All these things are included. Now, did we include everything? Probably not. Are we...

Realistic, I think we are. So we've been very careful to make sure that we're not overly optimistic.

But we're also assuming that people will do this reasonably effectively so that you actually try to do this right. So again, for instance, when we talk about more immunization, we know that childhood immunization against measles and all these other childhood diseases have been incredibly effective, but there's still about 20% who are not vaccinated. Getting those vaccines out to the last 20% would still be incredibly effective, but it's

It's also going to be more expensive because you've gotten the easy 80%, if you will. The last 20% are going to be more uphill. But we include that in our estimates. So we actually assume that the cost of getting the next, so we don't assume that we'll get to 100%, but the next 10% up to 90% is going to be almost twice as expensive. Even with that, we find that because it's still going to save so many kids' lives,

It turns out that for every dollar spent, we'll do $101 of benefits. So we have tried to incorporate these kinds of things. But of course, you will never exactly know. So in Malawi, for instance, we've been working with Malawian government. We gave them a lot of different ideas of what would be incredibly beneficial.

cheap and effective policies. They didn't want to do a lot of them because, you know, that's what politics is about. There's a lot of reasons why you can't do this policy or there's not enough votes in this policy or, oh, this is going to give us bad press, that kind of thing. But what they did do was exactly the tablets. And what has turned out is because we spent our research on looking at what would it cost to get kids vaccinated,

because that's what the randomized control trials have done on, they have actually managed to get much cheaper pads or tablets because they're using Android. Right now, their cost is not $31 as we estimate it. It's more like $5 to $10.

I would be a little wary of that because it's not included in the corruption and the mismanagement. And probably also we'll want to wait and see if you can do it, if there's the same impacts. If there was some magic about the iPad, that's why we used it, because that's what the original period studies were on. But fundamentally, it shows not only can you get this right, but there's also a chance if you're really –

sort of very engaged government, you can possibly even do it cheaper than what we're suggesting, meaning that it'll be even better deal than what we're talking about.

Hey, everyone. Sorry for interrupting. I just wanted to extend a massive thank you to you for listening and tuning in and for your support over these three years. So we've had, you know, hundreds of guests that we've welcomed on the podcast. We've had millions of views with hundreds of thousands of different people listening in. So I just wanted to thank you. You know, I started this as a student and now currently working and I'm

I've always done this on the side just because I have a passion for it and I've enjoyed it and probably similar to yourself, you listen to all these

uh you know different youtube channels and podcasts of people uh listening to different guests that's how i started and i uh just wanted to sort of take the plunge and be able to have the opportunity to speak to these people and you've made that happen so thank you very much uh just myself don't make any money from this and it's really a passion project so thanks for uh supporting that that passion of mine uh if you wanted to support the channel uh

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Yeah, it's a great example. And it's something that sounds, you know, maybe not easy, but it sounds like it's quite intuitive to implement. And I'd be interested to hear, you know, if we look at foreign, I don't know the exact number, but I imagine the foreign aid that countries, the developed world pays out is a lot higher than this number that you are suggesting. So be interested. And I know you mentioned a little bit at the start, but, you know,

They're not popular either. So it's not as if foreign aid, you know, giving foreign aid is popular in the UK or in the US, especially when there's problems there. So what are the challenges or what are the problems with it? Is it just that it's being allocated in the wrong place? They've been doing this way forever, so they're not going to change. Be interested to hear your thoughts on that.

Yeah. So roughly the world spends about $200 billion in development aid around the world. Again, remember, this is a very small number. We're talking about 0.2% of global GDP. A lot of people think it's an enormous number. It's not. But $200 billion could definitely pay for this. As you pointed out, the whole package that we're suggesting is $35 billion a year. So clearly we could afford that. Perfect.

But again, you also need to remember that foreign aid is given in a lot of other aspects. It's very political. So in the U.S., a lot of this development money is given to very particular things that people want. It's often given to allies. So some of the development aid goes to Israel, for instance. And likewise, you have a lot of other places where there are specific reasons why you give specific money, probably also for

political arguments and to buy friends and influence and all kinds of other things. So we're not going in there and say, get rid of all that. Of course, it'd be nice if we could, but that's probably unrealistic. What we're saying is,

when your next project ends, when you have available resources or when you give more money, as most countries regularly do because they give a percentage of their GNI, if you spend extra money, why don't you spend it here first? And so the point here is to say, sure, there are lots of reasons why we don't give effectively or as efficiently as we could.

But let's at least start with saying the next resources, the next batch of money, let's spend it on these incredibly effective policies. One other thing. So when you talk to most politicians that are working within the field of development,

They love to say, oh, I did this project and it was good for farmers and it was good for women. It was good for handicapped people and it was good for marginalized groups. And we also managed to both do education and agriculture. And they love to tick all these boxes. A standard sort of saying in economics is if you want to do one thing, you should have one tool. If you want to do three things, you need three tools. If you use one tool to do everything,

10 or a dozen things, chances are it's a really, really ineffective tool for all of them. But it sounds good. I just help everyone in so many different ways with my project. Yes, but you help them really ineffectively. And so again, what we try to pull people back on is saying, look, we get that it's great to get headlines. We get that it's great to talk about all the different things you solve.

So fundamentally, if you're going to be spending taxpayer money on trying to do good in the world, it would stand to reason to say you should be trying to do it the best way possible. Yeah, I think something that stood out to me is when I was sort of going through the book, a lot of these suggestions were related to health. At least I think that, you know, I don't know if it's majority, but at least a large portion of health. Yeah, about half. That sort of was my intuition. But yeah.

so yeah it seems and i think this links a lot to you know you sort of put a value on life as well so is that sort of the it's really the fact that you know so many people are dying and actually have the opportunity to contribute to their society or you know to live a life and be able to add value so it seems like that's where you know a lot of the the benefit could come from yes so economists

are very sort of hard-nosed people. And they like to point out that we implicitly do a lot of things that we don't really like to talk about. So very clearly,

When you make a decision between spending money on building an opera house, which is going to be nice and it's going to be wonderful and it's going to lead to more arts in our country, or build a roundabout, which is going to save people, or build a new school, which is going to make sure our kids get better educated. Those are hard tradeoffs.

But you need to put them into the discussion of saying, so how much is this going to cost and how much good is it going to do? One of the important things that you do when you try to do good is that you save lives. And as you point out, economists say, what's the value of a human life? Now, to most people, that feels really, really wrong because clearly the value of a human life is infinite. That's sort of our standard go-to sense. Well, surely, you know,

This life is infinite, is infinitely valuable. But clearly it's not because we're letting 18 million people die each year, mostly from poverty. We could have helped those people and we didn't. So we decided to spend our money on ourselves and the rich world instead of helping these 18 million people.

My point is simply to say, well, what is the value then of one human life? Well, we have a lot of different ways to estimate that, and they all turn out to reasonably get to the same point. Governments in the rich world, for instance, routinely put in measures and road safety measures.

when it helps save a lot of lives and it's fairly cheap, but not when it's incredibly expensive and saves almost no lives. So for instance, putting in a middle divider in a road is often a very, very effective use of resources because when people veer into the other side of the road and get head-on collisions, that's when a lot of people die. And putting up these

middle dividers is often fairly reasonable. So you do that where there's a lot of traffic, but not when there's very little traffic. You do the same thing with roundabouts. You put them in where they'll save a reasonable number of people, but not where they'll save almost no people. When you do the calculation for this and many of the things that governments do in the rich world, it turns out that it reaches a reasonably similar number, which is that you want to reduce

the risk so much that the cost of reducing the risk of one full human life is about somewhere between one and ten million dollars. It depends a little bit on where you live and it depends a lot on how much your income is. The poorer you are, the less you're willing to pay for this. Not surprisingly, because you have many other issues where you could equally spend the money and actually save lives and also get a lot of other very, very important things.

We have worked together with Harvard University and Gates Foundation, many others to try to come up with what is the value then in general, given your GDP. And it turns out that there's a reasonably simple formula. And that's the one that we use in the book to show what's the value, not actually of saving a full human life, but saving one human life one year.

This also accords to something else that we see people do. When, for instance, people are asked to work dangerous jobs like in mining or something else, where there's a higher risk of dying.

You ask for a raise. But remember, it's not like you say my raise should be infinite. Well, you wouldn't ever get that. You ask for a somewhat higher wage or what the Brits call a danger money. So you basically get an additional amount of money in order to accept a higher risk of death.

And when you calculate that, it turns out that those are very similar. That is one to $10 million for a full human life. And so we use all of that knowledge to calculate what's the value of a human life, because that's both what governments and individuals seems to indicate is actually the value of a human life.

It's very useful because it suddenly makes it possible for us to make decisions between so should we be spending money on education where you'll have higher productivity and lots of other good outcomes or in health where you'll save lives and avoid families being broken up and all these things. But it'll also have this very huge opportunity of actually making sure kids don't die.

We still don't know how to exactly value the opera house. And that's going to be a hard one. And we haven't done that. But that was certainly not on the priority list right here.

Yeah, thanks for explaining. I'm sure, yeah, tens of thousands of hours has gone into just getting to that number, but it's vital for understanding these things. So I'd be interested to hear, was there anything that maybe was on the edge, you know, that had really massive benefits, but was just too expensive, I guess, to include in the book? Oh, God, there's lots and lots of things. So, you know,

One thing that a lot of people talk about is clean water and sanitation. So clean water, obviously, without clean water, you won't survive. And without sanitation, you'll have a very hard time not making sure that a lot of other people don't die from the related diseases.

The problem with these things is that it's also very expensive. Remember, it's not that people in the world don't actually have access to clean drinking water because otherwise they'd be dead. So the reality of most clean drinking water, when you talk about it, is to have

more easily accessible clean drinking water, which would allow a lot of women and especially girls to not miss out on their schooling and other things because they wouldn't have to walk as far to get water. So there's a lot of benefits involved, but there's also a lot of costs. Sort of generally, we find that the benefit cost ratio of clean water is somewhere around five to six. So for every dollar spent, you get five to six dollars of good

That's a good thing, but it's not nearly as good as the other things I told you about with education, for instance, delivering $65 or more than 10 times more good for every dollar spent. So, again, our point is you should do the education bit first and then focus on more clean water. Sanitation turns out to be even harder when you talk about some things like water.

digging pit latrines, which is some of the cheapest things to do. People will say they use them. They don't, unless you spend a lot of resources to actually keep it nice and clean every day. Most people won't use it. So what you end up with is something that looks good on paper that you can tell to international organizations we've fixed it, but you actually haven't. And so what we find again is, yes, it's good. It's one of the things we should do for every dollar spent. You'll only do $3 of good.

There's also the big thing that a lot of rich countries worry about, which is climate. And climate clearly is a problem. But many of the ways that we try to fix climate right now, which is mainly cutting carbon emissions, is incredibly expensive and only delivers a tiny benefit a long way from now. So the benefits are somewhere between half and $2. So sometimes you'll spend a dollar and actually help the world 2%.

Two dollars to be two dollars better off, which is good, but nowhere near the kind of things that we're talking about. But sometimes and many times in the rich countries, they're so expensive that we spend a dollar and only do 50 cents of good or even less on climate initiatives. And that obviously is.

is a bad idea. The one thing that you should do in climate, what we found when we worked together with more than 50 of the world's top climate economists and three Nobel laureates, was that you should invest more money in research and development into green energy, because that's one of the ways that you fairly cheaply can leverage research. And we find this in many different areas, leverage research so that you can make

the whole world much better off at a fairly low cost. We find that every dollar there will eventually reduce climate damages by about $11. So that's one of the things that got pretty close, but it wasn't near the $15, which is why it's not included in the $12.

Yeah, you read my mind. I was going to ask about that. And I guess, you know, applying these principles to develop well, because I think it's something that I'm sure it's something that is done. But then, as you said, there's lots of focus on climate. So would you say that maybe, you know, in the near term, you know, there's green R&D, which is going to be positive in the longer term. But in the near term, is it sort of carbon capture and those more those tools to sort of try and.

reduce the emissions without completely revolutionizing the system that will be the most beneficial or are there any other things other than R&D? Yeah. So most economists will say you should have a carbon tax on

on CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions. And we find that if you do that reasonably well, which means that you need to do this globally, you can probably do $2 back in the dollar. It's fairly expensive, but the benefits are twice as large. Remember, most of the benefits don't go to you. They go to everyone else in the world, which is one of the reasons why it's hard to get everyone to do it. Of course, the reality is that most countries are just not very good at doing this, even in the rich world.

in the OCD, we have thousands of different essential carbon prices. Many of them are zero and

And we don't do a very good job because it's hugely infected by politics. So, for instance, heating or oil for oil products for farmers are hugely subsidized, whereas gasoline for cars are incredibly expensive in many European countries, for instance. So we're wildly off on what the right carbon price should be and how we should do this. But again, we need to remember

That this will only, if you will, deliver two dollars back in the dollar if we do it really well. We don't. And for many reasons, we would probably never get that to be sort of the fundamental global model where everybody has the same carbon price and all things and slowly ramp it up over the century. We still believe that it'll be.

that'll be net beneficial, that it'll be above $1 back in the dollar, even with only semi-good implementation. But we're nowhere near that. And so, yes, this is one of the things we should be doing. We should also focus on adaptation. But again, outside of coastal protection, which you need big sort of project where you need to get everybody together in a big area, many adaptations will happen individually. And so it's, it's,

like governments are going to be able to do a lot of good in that area. So again, the fundamental point to fixing climate change is if you want to get eventually everyone to not use fossil fuels, you need to come up with an energy source that's green, CO2 low or zero CO2.

And that everyone will want, not just rich, well-meaning people in Britain and the US and Denmark, but also people in India and China and Africa, which are going to be the main emitters over the 21st century. And they have much, much more important issues, as we've talked about.

You know, they have a lot of things that still deliver 15 or many, many times higher benefits back. And they obviously have lots of poverty and hunger and regular pollution that they want to fix first. So we need to make sure that we make their opportunities

so great that they'll just simply want to buy these green future technologies. One good example is fourth generation nuclear. I'm not saying I'm in favor of it or anything. I'm simply saying this is one obvious place where if you can actually make fourth generation nuclear as the

say they can, incredibly cheap and incredibly safe. And we would basically have these small modular nuclear reactors and you could just pop them anywhere and they would not give rise to nuclear weapons or a real concern about either safety or what you're going to do about the waste afterwards.

you would have incredibly safe and very cheap electricity. Of course, everyone would buy them. Now, we're not there yet, but we should definitely be investing in the research and development necessary to see if that could be one of the solutions. And again, there are lots of other potential solutions, lots of solar and wind with lots and lots of batteries. But again, we're not there yet, but we could be. And once we're

Green energy is cheaper than fossil fuels. Everyone will switch and we'll fix climate change. So, again, the economist solution to this is instead of trying to push everything to do everyone to do something they don't want to do, invest in green energy R&D so that everyone will want to do the right thing.

Yeah, great message. So Bjorn, thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciate all the different places we've touched on. I'm sure we could talk for a couple more hours. But my last question is, what is one message you'd like people to take away from our conversation and from the book as well?

Well, so fundamentally, what we try to do is cost-benefit analysis. This can be applied everywhere, anywhere. And it's not the only thing you need to look at it, but certainly is a relevant input. And so I hope people have enjoyed our conversation. And what we've tried to do is basically try to put a lot of prices or price tags on a lot of different things the world can do and say, here are some of the amazing things you can do. Here's some, okay, and here's some stupid things.

And we're just basically making the very, very obvious point. Do the really smart stuff first. So, you know, if people take away from this, do the best thing first. I'm very excited. And that's exactly what the world should do.

Great. Let's hope there's people listening who can make the change. So Bjorn, thanks again for your time. If anyone wanted to find out more about your work and what you do, where was the best place for that thing? So obviously, as you mentioned, the best things first, the new book. I've also written a book on climate change, which we call False Alarm, which is saying, yes, it's a real problem. We're scared witless, which makes us make very poor investments, just come out in a new edition. So maybe you'd want to look at that. Twitter, Bjorn Lomborg.

or, you know, we have our website, Copenhagen consensus.com, where you can see all of our period research freely available. Perfect. I'll pull that in the description. Thanks again for your time. Brilliant. Thank you. Hey,

Hey everyone, thank you for listening. I really appreciate the support. If you've got value out of this, I'd really appreciate if you could like, subscribe or comment, you know, good or bad feedback. I'm always open to that, but it really helps to the channel. As I said before, only about 14% of people actually subscribe to this channel. So if you work to that, it would really help. It could mean we could continue to grow. If not, thanks for watching and see you on the next show. And you also might like this video right here. All right. Thanks again.